As for Dahmer, who also saw the photograph in the Sentinel, he still had no idea that he had murdered the brother of the boy whose complaint had sent him to the Work Release Center. ‘If I’d have known who I was dealing with,’ he said, ‘I sure as hell wouldn’t have bothered asking him back, that’s for sure.’ Even so, what was his motive for killing him? Or did he not intend to kill him? He was not looking for anyone that day. Konerak walked into his path by the purest chance; he was not homosexual or consenting to anything more than posing for money. The poses were, however, taken with his hands behind his neck and his chest thrust forward, the very position in which Dahmer always placed his corpses when he was picturing them. It is more than likely that this pose triggered the fetishist in him and excited him to convert Konerak from a model to a personal possession. When the boy posed in that position, he was doomed. Dahmer says that he did not plan on killing him when he was out at the bar having a late beer, but concedes that it was very probable that the mood would come. Would he have let him go if he had not escaped on to the street? ‘No, I hadn’t let the others go, I don’t see why I would let him go. I doubt that very much.’
A further motive presents itself, one more calculating, callous and cold. Now that the boy had been seen with him, by police and neighbours alike, he had become potential evidence and had to be rubbed out for that reason alone. ‘I just didn’t want him saying anything,’ he admits obliquely. ‘I couldn’t afford mistakes like that, so I was scared even then.’ It is at least possible that Konerak died, not to keep Jeff Dahmer company, but to keep his mouth shut.
On 28 May, Dahmer took a day off work to devote himself to the disposal of two bodies, and the following day reported to his probation officer, Donna Chester, that he had ‘no major problems’. The first signs of imminent collapse were beginning to show. On the one hand, he was taking too much time off from the chocolate factory and had to be warned that he would soon run out of ‘points’ and risk dismissal. On the other, Mr Princewill warned him that the smells emanating from his apartment were intolerable and he risked eviction. Donna Chester was growing concerned about him; she sent him to Dr Crowley who, on 11 June, took one look at him and prescribed some powerful anti-depressant pills. It was all too late. Jeff Dahmer could lose job, home, health, and still not be able to shake off the obsession which now governed his every waking hour. He was about to be consumed by it.
There was still the loving, sweet presence of his grandmother on the distant periphery of his life, who might just redeem him from the brink of bleak insanity. She was involved in a car accident as she was driving home, which wrecked the car and left her with slight scratches. Suddenly, Jeff Dahmer was wrenched from his nightmare to be reminded of ordinary, healthy concerns. He went to see her to ‘help out’ and expressed a hope that she might stay with her cat and not attempt to drive again. ‘It’ll be a lot safer for her,’ he said. It was a rare moment when he was able to externalise, to think of somebody other than the self which drove him and monopolised his energies. Weeks later, Detective Murphy would bear the task of calling upon this old lady to break the news that her grandson had butchered three men in her basement.
The unequal battle reached its apogee in July. On 30 June, Dahmer met twenty-year-old Matt Turner at the bus station in Chicago, brought him back to Milwaukee and strangled him. He was not reported missing. Five days later, also in Chicago, he met Jeremiah Weinberger, a twenty-three-year-old half-Puerto Rican, half-Jewish man with an adust complexion, who died probably on 7 July after a long ordeal. Police had an accurate description of Dahmer as being the last person seen with Weinberger, and an artist’s impression of his face. It was on 12 July that he bought the 57-gallon blue barrel in which to dump the accumulating remains of mutilated bodies. On 15 July he met twenty-four-year-old Oliver Lacy in the street, took him home and strangled him. Lacy was a handsome black body-builder whose head and skeleton Dahmer fancied to keep to adorn his shrine. He was reported missing by the fiancee he had dated for many years, Rose Colon. The same day, Ambrosia Chocolate suspended Dahmer pending a review of his record on attendance.
It made no difference. Dirty and unshaven, he told Donna Chester that he was seriously thinking of suicide. (He had thought of injecting himself with formaldehyde, but was afraid it might take too long to have effect.) He was running out of money and would have to leave the apartment. He did not know where he would go or how he would live. She contacted the Salvation Army on his behalf and placed him on their list for emergency accommodation. She also gave him addresses of food banks where he could secure a free meal. He was degenerating into a tramp.
That same day, Thursday, 18 July, he went from Donna Chester’s office to see Dr Crowley again. Crowley noted that he was ‘tense, anxious, and very depressed’, and privately thought him to be in a very bad way indeed. He had no hesitation in offering more anti-depressants, but the prescription was never presented to a chemist. Instead, Dahmer’s behaviour on his way home was, in the circumstances, incredible. He approached a black man named Ricky Thomas and invited him back to his apartment for a drink. Thomas declined. Dahmer was no longer able to think sequentially or to act with logic. He was a hostage to his compulsion. At his lowest point, the only solace he could imagine was another body.
On Friday, 19 July, he had word that he was fired. ‘As I told you yesterday,’ wrote Allen Zipperer, ‘the company has completed its investigation and has decided to convert your suspension to a termination for excessive absenteeism. Jeff, it is truly unfortunate that you did not take corrective action to improve your attendance record. This is something that you alone control. If you have any personal belongings on company property please arrange for its removal no later than July 25, 1991.’ Upon receipt of this news, Dahmer went out and spied twenty-five-year-old Joseph Bradehoft at a bus-stop near Marquette University. A married man with a two-year-old daughter, Bradehoft was known to have bisexual inclinations. He was estranged from his wife, who had filed for separation and placed a restraining order on him not to visit. He went home with Jeffrey Dahmer, was strangled and dismembered.
The scene at Apartment 213 in that week from 12 to 19 July was more lurid than Giotto’s vision of hell on the wall of the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, which depicts devils munching on the intestines of the fallen. When Oliver Lacy was being massaged in one room, the headless body of Jeremiah Weinberger was floating in a bath of cold water and bleach next door. Dahmer was obliged to take a shower with two corpses in the tub. He took one photograph of Matt Turner in a standing position after death, because rigor mortis had set in and he was able to position the body properly. Other pictures show a headless Oliver Lacy hanging by a strap from the bar of the shower curtain, and the same mutilated corpse, also with the rib-cage exposed, lying on top of the decapitated body of Weinberger. Both heads were separately preserved in the fridge and freezer, along with two others. A bag containing internal organs was stuck to the bottom of the freezer. Hearts were in the fridge, and a whole bicep, large enough to cover a plate, had been fried and eaten. The drum in the bedroom contained the remains of three people. Bradehoft was murdered on the 19th. Dahmer left his body on the bed and covered it with a blanket for two days. He does not say where he slept during this time, but we may assume it was beside the corpse. On 21 July, he uncovered the body to find the head was covered in maggots. So he cut it off, cleaned it, and placed it in the freezer. We are fast approaching the denouement.
These are not the actions of a man in possession of himself, but rather of one ‘possessed’ by demonic force; they are the wild, perplexing, irreducible acts of raging dementia. He says he was too tired to keep up with the tasks of dissection he had imposed upon himself, but his exhaustion did not interrupt plans for his shrine. He completely ‘defleshed’ (his word) the body of Oliver Lacy in order to have the second of the two skeletons he needed to guard each end of the altar (the first was Ernest Miller). He even investigated the cost of a freeze-drying machine, in the vain hope that he m
ight be able to ‘keep’ people whole by preserving them in perpetuity. But a machine large enough for the purpose would have cost $30,000. Embalming he would not consider, because the embalmed body does eventually decay. The two griffins had been damaged in a fight, when one of the victims kicked the table and knocked them over, but he did not discard them; they were essential to an aim far dearer to him than maintaining a job or leasing an apartment. Thus far had his grasp of reality evaporated.
Incidentally, the admission that the griffins were damaged in a struggle casts a grim light on the way in which victims of this final frenzy died. No longer is it always a matter of deep sleep and unconscious oblivion. The murderer has become sloppy, careless, lacking in concentration, and this one man had to be subdued by brute strength. At what stage was he resisting? ‘As strangulation was going on.’ He wasn’t sleeping, then? ‘Not quite asleep, no, not quite.’10 So he fought for his life, albeit with reduced power. It would not help to identify him, but it is obvious that this was no cosy search for company, but a contest won by overwhelming forces. Jeffrey Dahmer’s mind had turned to compost.
When asked whether he felt remorse for what he had done, Dahmer said, ‘Yes, I do have remorse, but I’m not even sure myself whether it’s as profound as it should be. I’ve always wondered myself why I don’t feel more remorse.’* There were three that he picked out for especial contrition, though in the first two cases it is more a question of pity for himself than for the victim. He regretted Steven Hicks because of the shock: ‘I wish I hadn’t done it’; Steven Tuomi because ‘I had no intention of doing it in the first place’; and Jeremiah Weinberger because ‘he was exceptionally affectionate. He was nice to be with.’11 That is a devastating comment, at once pathetic and replete with implication. I hope it may permit a closer examination of exactly what happened to Jeremiah.
* Dennis Nilsen: ‘Words like sorry hold little comfort for the bereaved. I mistrust my own inner sincerity to bear even to utter them.’
Aaron Weinberger adopted the Puerto Rican/Jewish little boy and brought him up under his own name. He knew that Jeremiah was homosexual and wont to stay away from home for a night or two, but he always telephoned to let him know where he was. He lived with his father in order to save money for college, and had ambitions to seek a career in art design. He was good-looking and very self-conscious about his physical appearance. At weekends he would go to Chicago gay taverns such as Carol’s, Roscoe’s, Sidetracks, to meet friends and socialise, but during the week he regularly stayed at home. On the evening of 5 July, he stopped by a restaurant at 10.30 p.m. to see a friend who worked there, Ted Jones, and told him he intended to go dancing at the Vortex, and would meet Ted after work at Carol’s Bar on 1355 North Wells Street. Ted got to Carol’s Bar by about 2.30 in the morning.
There he saw Jeremiah in animated conversation with a blond man, animated at least on his part – the blond was rather quiet. Jeremiah came over to him and said, ‘This guy wants me to leave here and go to Milwaukee for the weekend. What do you think?’ Ted replied, ‘He looks okay, go for it. You don’t have anything else to do this weekend.’ Jeremiah returned to the blond man and sat beside him at the bar. Shortly afterwards they went to a dark backroom where they kissed and embraced. ‘He was very affectionate in the bar,’ recalled Dahmer. ‘He was giving me blow jobs right in the bar and everything.’ There is surprise in his voice, the surprise of a man to whom this degree of unforced attention was novel. It might be that here was somebody so keen on Dahmer’s company that he would stay with him of his own accord! They walked back to the bar area, where Dahmer sat on a stool with Jeremiah on his lap. Jeremiah called Ted Jones over and spoke with him for half an hour, while Dahmer moved to an adjacent stool and brooded, saying nothing. In that moment, perhaps, the spell was broken. Jeremiah could not, after all, be his and his alone, because he had connections, he was tied by friendships to other people like this man, he belonged to people. That was an intolerable thought.
Last call for drinks was at 3.45 a.m. Ted Jones said, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow to see if you want to go to a picnic this weekend. If there’s no answer, I’ll assume you went for the weekend.’ Dahmer and Weinberger took the Greyhound bus to Milwaukee, a ride of an hour and a half during which Weinberger made love to his new friend all the way. ‘He was all over me on the bus ride home.’ The damage was done, the trust dissipated, back in Carol’s Bar. Besides which, it was questionable whether at this stage Jeff Dahmer could see anything for what it was. Jeremiah was genuinely attracted to him, and had made advances to nobody else. That was not enough for Dahmer, however.
When they got home, they embraced and had oral sex, after which Dahmer prepared his treacherous mixture of drink and sleeping pills. ‘I wanted to see if I could find a way of keeping him with me without actually killing him.’ The irony is, he would probably have stayed, as he had told Ted Jones that he would be away for the whole weekend and his enthusiasm was evident. While this kind and decent man slept, Dahmer drilled through his skull and, for the first time, the acid injections having resulted in fatalities, he squirted boiling water into his brain.
‘He woke up at the end of the day, the next morning, and he was sort of groggy and everything. He talked, it was like he was dazed and I thought I would be able to keep him that way.’ Jeff helped him take a shower. Jeremiah said nothing about his head. There was no blood or liquid effusion of any kind. He was up for about six hours, just sleepy and indecisive. He made no effort to leave the apartment. Of course, he did not know what had happened to him, and could not understand why he felt so comatose. ‘He was walking around, going to the bathroom, but I had to go to work the second night, at the end of the second day, and he was still walking around so I gave him another dose of pills and another shot of boiling water in the same hole.’ He left Jeremiah lying on the bed.
The next morning he returned to find him dead. He had fallen off the bed and was lying on the floor, his eyes wide open. Dahmer was surprised the eyes should be open like that, as all the others had died with their eyes closed. One must only hope that Jeremiah did not wake up and endeavour to save himself from this madness into which he had fallen.
Dahmer took seven pictures of him, the first as he lay there on the floor, staring in disbelief, the others after decapitation. The headless torso lay in cold water and bleach in the bathtub for a week.
In the meantime, Aaron Weinberger reported his son missing, and Ted Jones, Allen Patrykus and Chuck Plimmer coincided in their description of the man he had accompanied to Milwaukee. Based on this, police artist John Holmes drew a likeness of the suspect which was to be circulated among Chicago’s gay community in the hope somebody might know him. Events over the next twenty-four hours were to render that drawing superfluous.
Dahmer’s career was reaching its climax. He was dominated by his aberrant desires, held captive by them to the point where they banished every other thought. ‘Nothing else gave me pleasure towards the end, nothing, not the normal things, especially near the end when things just started piling up, person after person, during the last six months. I could not get pleasure from going out to eat, I just felt very empty, frustrated, and driven to continue doing it. None of these are excuses for what I did, but those are the feelings I had in those last months, really intensive. For some reason, I kept doing it. I knew my job was in jeopardy around February. All I would have had to do was just stop for several months at a time and space it out, but it didn’t happen that way. I was just driven to do it more frequently and more frequently until it was just too much – complete overload. I couldn’t control it any more.’12
If there was one moment at which the fatal decision was made, it was at 9 a.m. on 15 July. Dahmer had a partially drugged Oliver Lacy in the apartment and a beheaded Jeremiah Weinberger in the bathtub. He had tried putting Lacy to sleep with chloroform, but it didn’t work, which surprised him because ‘it worked okay on fruit flies in biology class at school’. He knew he would have to go to work in
about an hour, but he liked Lacy and wanted to keep him, just one more, just this one. How was he to choose what to do? If he went to work Lacy would have recovered by the morning and would almost certainly not want to stay – he was not gay anyway. Dahmer called Ambrosia Chocolate and asked for a ‘personal day’, that is an extra day’s leave. It was granted, but the next evening, with Lacy dead, he was told that he had exceeded his permitted number of ‘personal days’ and was henceforth suspended. Oliver Lacy was ‘the one who started the dominoes falling’.13
‘If I’d been thinking rationally I would have stopped. I wasn’t thinking rationally because it just increased and increased. It was almost like I wanted it to get to a point where it was out of my control and there was no return. I mean, I was very careful for years and years, you know. Very careful, very careful about making sure nothing incriminating remained, but these last few months, they just went nuts.’14
He thought back to Chicago. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone there. Maybe that’s when it started going wrong. He would probably not have lost his job if he had pulled on the brakes then. ‘It just seemed like it went into a frenzy this last month. Everything really came crashing down. The whole thing started falling down around my head.’ In the final week, he had to think. He was going to have to vacate the apartment, and that must mean abandoning his shrine, the two skeletons, the eleven skulls and heads, all that beauty he was creating. ‘That was the last week I was going to be in that apartment building. I was going to have to move out and find somewhere to put all my possessions. Should I get a chest and put what I wanted to keep in that, and get rid of the rest? Or should I put an end to this, try to stop this and find a better direction for my life? That’s what was going through my mind that last week.’15
The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer Page 20